Spatial Computing Opportunities in Biomedical Decision Support: The Atlas-EHR Vision

We consider the problem of reducing the time that healthcare professionals need to understand the patient's medical history through the next generation of biomedical decision support. This problem is societally important because it has the potential to improve healthcare quality and patient outcomes. However, navigating electronic health records (EHR) is challenging due to high patient-doctor ratios, potentially long medical histories, urgency of treatment for some medical conditions, and patient variability. The current EHR systems provide only a longitudinal view of patient medical history, which is time-consuming to browse, and doctors often need to engage nurses, residents, and others for initial analysis. To overcome this limitation, we envision an alternative spatial representation of patient histories (e.g., electronic health records) and other biomedical data in the form of Atlas-EHR. Just like Google Maps, which allows a global, national, regional, and local view, Atlas-EHR can start with an overview of the patient's anatomy and history before drilling down to spatially anatomical subsystems, their individual components, or subcomponents. Atlas-EHR presents a compelling opportunity for spatial computing since healthcare is almost a fifth of the US economy. However, traditional spatial computing designed for geographic use cases (e.g., navigation, land survey, and mapping) faces many hurdles in the biomedical domain. This article presents several open research questions under this theme in five broad areas of spatial computing.